


"The Wonder"

by Treerat



Series: Nessesary Claiming [1]
Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Multi, Near Death Experiences, Pacific ocean, World War II, seaplane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 10:29:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16366184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Treerat/pseuds/Treerat
Summary: Continuing adventures/missions of Nick and Judy in the Pacific during World War II.Our fox and rabbit seaplane crew go out on their longest ranged mission to date.  Things go well.  But, on the return leg they encounter a typhoon, enemy fighters, and an experience that leaves them in awe.Note: I'm waiting for a book to show up so as to include a quote from it.  When I get it the quote will be posted in "notes" at the end of this story piece.3 Dec. 2018:  Here is that quote;  "Their hearts, contemptious of death, shall dare His roads between the thunder and the sun."-George SterlingOnce again, my thanks to Stubat for doing a betaread and edit.





	"The Wonder"

 

 

               The Martin seaplane rattled and jerked about as if a couple of giants were using it to play “Kick the Can”.  In the right seat, the rabbit doe looked out the front windscreen.  A never ending fall of hard pounding rain made a sound like another giant was slinging great handfuls of BBs at the big aircraft.   Between the rain and the dark gray gloom of the cloud it was difficult to see more than a few dozen yards.  That range increased a little when a lightning flash happened.  To Judy, it felt like this nightmare had gone on for a long time, and showed no sign of ending.  A great blaze of searing white light flooded in from the left.  It relieved the gloom for a second.  And in that time the bunny thought she caught the sight of something moving in the clouds ahead.  Another bolt and…there it was again, a light absorbing black shape that sent a chill through her very bones.

               “Flash!”

               There, closer, and more defined in shape.  Long ears, four paws (two short ones up front, two long strong looking ones at the rear), sleek body, and almost no tail.

               “Rattle, bounce, jump, FLASH!”

               An elongated black head topped by a pair of upright long ears seemed to fill the water splashed windscreen.  Blood red eyes looked straight at her.  Fear unlike anything she had ever experienced filled her, then an instant later, it was supplanted by a rage as hot as the sun!

               “Do it!” Judy mentally bellowed at the apparition.  “Get it over with!”

 

               *             *             *             *             *               *             *             *             *             *               *             *

 

               Nick and Judy were tapped with a special mission.  One that would take them deeper into enemy territory than they had ever been.  So far was the range that, even equipped with spare tanks in the engine nacelle bays, they would have to refuel going there and coming back.  It also entailed a stay at a non-inhabited island for a rest stop.  Though the island was off the ‘beaten path’, they would carry camo netting to conceal the plane from any possible air patrols, just in case.  At some 2,300 miles in, they landed on the water to meet up with a submarine.  While the crew fueled up the plane, four mammals onboard transferred to the Martin.  They brought with them two inflatable rafts, their small arms, and some other equipment.  From there, they flew to the rest island, parked the plane in the small cove there, and strung the camo nets.

               “We reconned the island a week ago and it’s still uninhabited,” the leader of the commando team had told them earlier.

               At sunset, they took down the nets and took off.  A little over four hours later, they landed in the water off the east coast of the island of Mindanao where the commandos inflated their raft and then paddled to shore.  A couple of hours later, they returned.  There were two other mammals with them.  After knifing the raft to sink it, they headed back to the rest island once more to spend the day sleeping, then, in the evening, took off once more.  They met up with the sub to refuel and drop off the commando team and their charges.

               “Careful on your way back.  One of our subs radioed that they had encountered a nasty tropical storm on the way back to Havvaii,” they were told.

               The trip for the rest of the night and into the day was boringly routine, with Nick and Judy taking turns at the flight controls allowing one or the other to nap out for an hour or two.  It was about 0900 hrs. when Judy saw the cloud bank on the horizon.  That grew larger and larger as they went along.  She called Nick up to the cockpit.

               “Typhoon,” Nick said when he saw it. “Bad Ju-Ju to mess with it.”

               “Ju-Ju?” Judy questioned.

               “A kind of spirit magic or magic in general from some places.  There are those who regard these storms as evil spirits working their destructive magic,” the vulpine explained as he shifted to a more westerly heading.  “It’s moving east to west so we’ll see about staying ahead of it.”

               Over the next couple of hours, they got closer and saw that the storm front was huge.  Nick looked at their fuel gauges and nodded.

               “Plenty of gas to get home, even with having to dodge this thing,” he said.

               “Looks impressive,” Judy said, eyeing the cloud front. “We have some nasty weather in the Tri-Burrows but this is something I don’t think they will ever want to experience!”

               “They wouldn’t, trust me,” Nick replied. “Tell you what, let’s get closer so you can get a better look.”

               With that, he shifted heading and minutes later was about a dozen miles from the front cloud wall.  Judy’s fur felt prickly, like there was a static electricity charge built up.

               “Not any closer,” she said as she craned her head up to try to see the cloud tops.  “I don’t want to…”

               A glint of shiny metal caught her eye and the rabbit lost all interest in the storm.  As she brought it to her fox’s attention, she saw what appeared to be at least two more.

               “Allied planes are painted sky to sea blue or gray,” Judy thought. “Only enemy fighters run with light colors or no paint at all.”

               “Four of them, Alpha six Mikes, no belly tanks,” the sharper eyed tod called out.

               He pointed the seaplane’s nose down to shed altitude to put more distance between themselves and the fighters.

               “I don’t understand,” Judy, eyes on the planes above them, said. “I know they have some really good range, but without the drop tanks they shouldn’t be here.”

               “Which means they are flying off of a carrier,” Nick said.

               That chilled the bunny.  The presence of aircraft carriers (the enemy operated them in pairs, at the least) was not good news in any ways, means, or form.  There were a large number of possible targets in this area that they could attack.

               The four fighters peeled off and headed towards them.

               “Nick!  They’ve made us!” Judy hollered.

               Nick glanced at them, then looked at the storm wall just a few miles away.

               “Rock and a hard place!” he thought.

               “Cinch up, Fluff!  We’re goin’ in!” Nick yelled.

               Paws came up and she grabbed the cinch straps, one on each side of her torso at shoulder level, and yanked them hard, tightening up her safety harness.

               “Going in?  Into where?”

               Then Judy saw the fast approaching cloud wall.

               “Oh…freakin’…PELLETS!” she exclaimed.

 

               *             *             *             *             *               *             *             *             *             *               *

 

               First contact with the cloud wall wasn’t bad.  Rain splashed on the windscreen and the winds rattled the plane now and then.  Nick set a course to travel parallel with the storm arm, hoping to remain hidden long enough to ditch the fighters.  A line of tracers passing just under the left wing had Nick banking right while goosing the throttles forward some to gain altitude.  Another line of tracers streamed maybe a dozen yards above their heads and the Martin was jinked again.  The big seaplane ended up going deeper and deeper into the gloom of the storm.  And the further they were driven in, the rougher things got.

               “Judy!  Radio in the contact!” Nick yelled.

               Nearly bobbling the mike, Judith dialed in the desired frequency and started talking.  Repeatedly, she gave their ID code, their approximate position, and the info on the fighter planes and their suspicion that there were carriers somewhere nearby.  After three stations acknowledged receiving the report, she hung up the mike and then lightly set her paws on the control wheel.  By now they were lost in the storm, and no matter where they turned, things just got worse.

 

               *             *             *             *             *               *             *             *             *             *               *             *

 

               Glaring defiantly into those ruby blooded eyes, Judy felt the biggest hit on the plane and she shut her own.  She had no wish to see things come apart around her.  Then, it all stopped; everything felt smooth, calm, tranquil.  An eerie quiet went with it.

               “It’s over.  We’re dead,” the closed eyed Judy thought.

               She cracked her eyes open to see what it was like.  What she saw astonished the bunny.  Eyes full open, Judy raised her paws to look at them.  They were the same, yet something made them appear different.  It was the light that flooded in from above her, a light that gave everything she looked at a soft golden hue.  Raising her eyes to the sun almost straight overhead, she saw it was a perfectly round ball of gold.  Looking to Nick, her eyes widened, a golden halo enveloped and shimmered around the fox’s entire body.

               “Frith’s divine light!” she whispered in awed wonder.  “He found us worthy!”

               Then, another light intruded.  Beyond the vulpine, outside the side window, a jagged bolt of blue-white lightning flashed by, illuminating the lumpy structure of the cloud wall.  Her mind automatically began a count; eleven seconds passed before her ears heard the grumble of thunder whose shockwave vibrated the plane.  Then, Judy became aware of the droning sound of the engines.

               “If we’re beyond life, why are we still seeing and hearing worldly things?” her Logic asked.

               Turning her head to the right, she saw another towering storm wall a couple of miles away.  A great jagged mega-bolt of lightning lanced from the top downwards through the cloud wall to the sea, illuminating a miles wide section of that wall.  Two more followed in quick succession and the claps of thunder rattled the seaplane seconds later.

               “Nick.  What is going on?” she asked.

               “We’re in a…’canyon’, a gap, between the outer arm of the typhoon and the inner storm wall,” he said.

               Turning his head a bit, he saw Judy lift her paws up in front of her to examine them once again.  A golden halo encompassed his bunny mate.

               “And don’t ask me about the light because I have no idea!” he added.

               He looked to the compass for a few seconds then back out the windscreen.  There was no rain and he could see for miles and miles down that clear corridor that was lit up by shafts of light from the overhead sun and the bolts of Vulcan going off in the cloud walls.

               “The path has us pointed pretty much towards home.  Let’s hope it stays open, because I’m not sure how much more of a beating this ‘bird’ can take,” he said.

 

               *             *             *             *             *               *             *             *             *             *               *             *

 

               The diminutive fox studied the big Martin as, one engine running, it eased into its tiny artificial cove.  There were a number of places where the metal panels were pushed in and dented.  Some showed ripples in their surfaces, a sign that they had been squeezed, compressed from the sides in some manner.

               “What the hell did they run into?!” Finnick questioned as the gangplank was set at the rear fuselage side door.

               When he caught sight of the ragged looking pair leaning on each other any questions he had died on the spot.  Getting them into a vehicle, he drove them straight to the hostel they lived at.

               “You two sleep!  Whatever you have to tell Reg can wait until tomorrow,” he said.

 

               *             *             *             *             *               *             *             *             *             *               *

 

               Robe on, Judy came out of the bathroom to see that Nick was already in bed and dead to the world.  Going to him, the bunny nuzzled his muzzle tenderly.

               “My steel wall,” she whispered, then withdrew.

               Much as she wanted to join her fox in bed, there was something she had to do before any of it faded.  Pulling her journal off of its place on a shelf, she seated herself at a table, and opened the book to its next blank page.  After setting a blotter page behind the open page, she pulled a fountain pen out of a box, uncapped it, and checked to see that it wrote alright.  Pen in right paw, Judy placed another sheet of paper on the page to rest her writing paw on (this was to keep oils from her hand from getting on the page), then set to work.

 

               “Pulled another air mission.  For certain reasons I can’t say anything about it here.  But, during our flight back home something…wondrous happened to my fox mate and I.  And for all the terror we went through, I find myself humbly grateful at getting the privilege to see and experience a wonder that, I believe, very few mammals have ever encountered, or ever will.  This bunny hopes that she has the words to do all of it the justice it deserves.

               That said, let me tell you the story of how the Maker, Fate, or Chance placed us between the Thunder, and the Sun….”


End file.
